The bullet riddled corpse, story of Horace Mahoney
by Ranekaera
Summary: Yes, I changed the title. It was too cliche. Horace is running out of time... Rated for language, gore and violence.
1. Horace the Breaker Mahoney

Regrettably I do not own any of the characters from the thir13en ghosts

Here is my first chapter on Horace "the Breaker" Mahoney…… Is that Irish?

p.s. I know nothing about cars. Feel free to correct me.

The man worked quietly in his junkyard. His name was Horace, he was seven foot five, and he was almost thirty years old.

He was also a killer.

He didn't mean to kill people, especially not the women. If there was one thing his daddy had told him, it was never to hit a woman. That had been about the only good thing his daddy had ever told him. He had not been a good man, but he had been all poor Horace had had. And then he had died, leaving poor Horace all alone, and for the first time in _years_, he was a free man. At the moment, though, he wasn't killing anybody. He was working on his car.

It was an old 87 Firebird, and it was, Horace knew, a piece of junk. He was fixing it anyway. It was all dusty and the paint was scratched and peeling. The seats were spilling their stuffing all over the place, and all four tires were off; the car was up on four stacks of cinderblocks, piled three high to accommodate for his enormous height.

That was another thing his daddy had always told him. He was a freak, but he may as well make himself a useful freak.

_Here you go, daddy. Making myself useful, just like you always told me to. Bastard._ He thought. Really, Horace had the mental capacity of a very bright eighteen year old. He was not retarded, exactly, but he was not normal, either. He knew about women. He knew about babies. He even had graduated school, though at the freshman year in high school. He spent most of his time tinkering in the junkyard where he had been dumped by his uncaring mother.

From the road, he heard the screech of brakes and the squeal of ties on tar. Horace liked these sounds. It meant his road spikes still worked.

Grimacing slightly from the muggy, humid July night air, Horace Mahoney got to his feet and started to head out to "see what the trouble was" and see if anyone was hurt.

If no one was, well, he would have to do something about that.


	2. Horace makes some new friends

A/N: In case you didn't figure it out, at this point in the story, Horace is still among the living. Trailer trash rules! Oh, and sorry to those poor people who actually _own _Saabs; I meant no disrespect, it was simply the first car that popped into my head.

The bushes scraped him and clawed at his skin, but he didn't mind. He was so huge, and his nervous system stretched only so far, that he never even felt minor irritations.

The car that had "broken down" was a blue SAAB, with the rear window trash bagged in that peculiar way only trailer trash could ever think up. But then, he wasn't one to judge; _he_ lived in a broken down old mobile home shaped like a demented twinkie, and often camped out in a trashed garage.

There were three people standing around it, two adults and one child of about thirteen, Horace guessed. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his bandana to mop the sweat off his grotesquely distorted face. He wore a grease-stained gray work shirt with a pair of thin, ragged gray-blue work pants. A small set of keys jangled at his hip

The family saw him coming, but then, he saw they were not a family at all; the child looked nothing like the two adults, and neither of them wore wedding bands, as he later saw.

"Oh, look, maybe he can help. Hey!" called the man. Horace didn't listen to him. He focused his attention, instead, on the woman. She was a blonde with a flat chest and was much too thin. He thought she looked like the cream of society that people like him never got to set eyes on; a spoiled bitch, in other words. There child shrank back from him in fear. He smiled at it, for he couldn't tell if it was male or female, it was so ugly, and it, _she_ ran backwards, tripped and fell on her ass. Horace almost laughed, but that would have blown his cover.

"Someone put down road spikes and it totaled our car!" she declared angrily, stamping a foot on the ground as if to prove just how pissed off she was.

"Totaled" was hardly the word, Horace thought; it was so shot to shit already, he thought the four blown tires rather improved its appearance.

He loped out to the front of the car, bent, and picked up the set of road spikes that he, of course, had set down just earlier that afternoon. He draped them casually over one shoulder, hardly feeling their weight at all, and strode back to the "family".

"I own a junk yard just through the bushes there. Maybe you could buy a few new tires from me, and be on your merry way." He suggested in a quiet, rather smooth voice. It was deep, almost a bass, but he rarely shouted at anyone; he was just a quiet kind of guy.

"No! Auntie, he's a bad guy! Like on TV!" yelled the kid. Horace leered at her, and rolled his eyes.

"Well, if you don't want new tires, then maybe I can tow you back into town and you can buy some new." He said. He pointed to the end of the road, where he had just finished burying his most recent victim, under the telephone pole there. It was his tow truck, the chains and hook rusty with age and wear.

"Now that sounds like a better idea. What do you think, Rob?" asked the woman. The man shrugged and said "why not? He's got a tow truck, and we need a ride." Horace allowed himself a small smile. Right into his pocket, as always. He was surprised no one had asked about the spikes he had just picked up without explanation.

"What about that guy? The one who picks up hitchhikers and tears them apart? The one they call the Breaker?" asked the man just then, to Horace. He was trying to make conversation. So the media had given him a nickname? Breaker. Hm. He thought he could have done worse. But then, he wasn't supposed to be known at all, was he? Killers were supposed to remain anonymous, and he wasn't one of those flashy, show-offy killers, like the Ripper and the Boston Strangler; he didn't want to be found. But Horace was not one of the sharper tools in the shed, and he knew it. He knew he was not a very smart man, but he also knew he knew what he was doing. He began walking towards his truck, making it more than halfway in just four or five strides. He heard the people on the road behind him, hurrying to catch up. He smiled to himself. That was three more for tonight.

So far, he had killed a grand total of four people. Three of them were hitchhiking women, the fourth and most recent, a college student looking for a new fan belt for his broken down car. Horace had tampered with it earlier in the day, while the man had been out in the bushes going to the bathroom.

He opened the driver's side door, then reached over and casually opened the passenger's side door, not even having to lean over; his arm simply stretched that far. The people climbed in one by one, the man sitting closer to him.

He started the truck and it slowly crawled down the road to meet the broken down Saab. He pulled up in front of the vehicle, and stepped out. He unhooked the chain at the end of the arm to his tow and pulled it out by sheer force; the truck rocked on its shocks, and the people inside seemed tense, as if waiting for the ax to fall; but it wouldn't be an ax, Horace thought.

He fastened the hook to the front end of the car and calmly, lazily, walked back to his truck and climbed in. He restarted the engine and pushed the button that would lift the car's front wheels off the road.

"Where is this junkyard you own?" asked the man almost cheerfully. Horace looked at him, blank faced, lips unemotional and raised an eyebrow. The man must have thought his expression somehow cold and Lurch-like, because he didn't say anything else the entire ride. Horace pulled off to the side of the road, near the U-bend that would turn them around and into the junkyard. They were surrounded on all sides by trees, and there would be nowhere for them to run to.

"Hey, what are we pulling over for?" asked the woman sharply. Horace sighed. She would have to be the first to go, or she would scream. He hated it when they never ran in the end; they just stood there like idiots and screamed, as if screaming would save their lives. It didn't make him feel guilty; it just made him angry, that they would be so stupid. Why didn't they ever just give him a chase, as if to prove they really wanted to live? It was because they didn't really want to. They thought they were in the movies. People were so stupid; they were just asking to be brushed off.

"Gotta check under the hood. Something rattling." He grunted. In truth, he was actually going to get a roll of electrician's tape and some rope from the back.

He acted quickly, or else risk the people getting out and running for it.

He walked over to the passenger's side and opened the door. They just stared back at him. The child, who was closest to the door, stared at him with wide eyes.

"Out." He growled. The child began to whimper like a caged animal.

"Oh, god, you're him!" the man cried. Finally, Horace smiled, but it was not because he was happy; it was because clearly, the man wanted to live.

"Get out. Now. And don't make a sound." He said. Slowly, the woman made to crawl over the child. Clearly, she cared nothing for her niece. She stood straight, her back against the side of the truck, shivering and crying silently, not making a sound. Clearly, he had been wrong about her.

"W-w-what are you going to do to us?" asked the child, her seatbelt now undone.

Horace didn't reply, just lashed a length of rope roughly around the woman's wrists, binding them together with every ounce of force he could muster, which was enough to lift a little more than one entire end of a car. Bones snapped like twigs, and the woman finally did scream, a high, wavered note of pain. Blood spurted from the breaks in her skin and wet, yellow knobs of bone poked through. The kid began to cry. While the woman was distracted by her poor, bleeding wrists, Horace turned to the child. He grabbed her by the shirt and yanked her out of the truck so forcefully that she hit the ground head first, and boom, just like that, she was dead. _Hmm. I must've yanked a little too hard _he thought distractedly. Oh well. They all made mistakes. After all, he was only human.

"No! Don't! I-I'll work for you! Get you everything, anything you need! You like cars? I got a really nice car, back home, I--"

The man was cut short just then, because Horace dragged him out by the neck, picked him up off the ground and threw him against the telephone pole nearby. He hit with a sickening crunch, and blood fell from his mouth in a lazy black-red pool. He turned back to the woman, who just stared at her broken, bleeding wrists as if she had never seen them before. Then she looked up at him and tried to glare through her haze of pain.

"Bastard." She choked, and then she did something Horace never forgave in anyone.

She climbed back into his truck locked herself in, getting blood all over the interior.

Horace gave a roar of rage and simply shoved an elbow into the window, shattering it, and dragged the woman out by the hair. He began pulling, bending her body in half, folding it, making a bitch omelet out of her as her pathetic, wasted body snapped clean in two against the window frame. She came out of the truck folder over backwards, so that her head came out between her feet, and she fought no more.

Satisfied, Horace smashed a boot heel into her face, just to be sure. Blood sprayed in a ruby fountain from her hairline, making one side of her face a mask of gore.

He went and fetched the man against the telephone pole, and to make sure he was thoroughly dead, he snapped the neck in two pieces as easily as someone breaking a piece of toast in half. He dragged him over to the truck, then took the rope off the woman's wrists and used it to bind the three of them. He dragged them by the leftover slack and threw them under the arm of his tow truck.

He was going to need a new truck. People were so stupid.


	3. Dinner a lovely affair

I do not own Pepsi, NASCAR, tuna helper or anything else in here, except my characters, so no stealing or I'll sic Breaker on you.

Night had fallen, and Horace loped back towards his little mobile home. He had just thrown the three new bodies into the ground and covered them with a five pile high stack of crushed cars. More than three tons of crushed steel and ball bearings ought to keep the animals away, was his thought.

He pulled out his shabby old desk chair and opened the door and went immediately to the fridge, where two cans of Pepsi, a TV dinner and leftover Tuna helper. He grabbed a Pepsi and the leftovers and shut the fridge, in time to see the remains of his dead dog on the floor near his bed. Oh hell, he'd forgotten about that. He'd found it dead, its throat slashed, over near the edge of his junkyard, amidst piles and piles of trashed cars. Nearby had been quite a good deal of blood, and it hadn't smelled animal. He had paid it no mind, and instead had taken his dog back into the house. Now, he could see, a few maggots squirmed her and there. He bent down in the midst of taking a big bite of tuna helper and picked one out of the maggots in its neck, his dog's mouth frozen in a death snarl. He noticed its chain collar was also missing, and he wondered about that. Maybe later.

He turned to his TV with its rabbit ear antenna and switched on the cartoons. He had always like cartoons, and NASCAR was his favorite. He had always wanted to be a NASCAR driver, ever since he was a kid.

The moon shone fat and full outside, shining its cold light over the entire junkyard, which stretched almost a mile and a half back, surrounded on all sides by fences and trees.

Bits of upholstery from the cars flapped in the subtle breeze, and slowly, a flash of silver began to materialize out of the darkness. A pair of eyes for the second time begin to peer at their surroundings, only this time they are filled with an infinite sadness.


	4. Millie Mahar

Here's my new ghost, hope you guys like her. She's somewhat like me, but hey, most of my female characters are. I just can't fucking stand preppies and sluts, so I guess Ryan and I have something in common.

Read on.

Horace turned off his TV and listened hard. He heard something…some noise. He got up to go see what or who it was.

"No! DON'T TOUCH MY CAR!" he roared, as he saw five teenage boys all dressed in black trying to rock his precious car off the cinderblocks and onto a sledge with wheels on it. It was hooked to a big truck, for which Horace would have liked, had he not been so angry.

"Oh, _SHIT_, it's the Breaker, RUN!" one of them yelled. The boys all dropped the car and ran for it, and Horace had to give it to them, they were _fast_. All but one of them got away, and the one he caught was fat and wouldn't bend. In the end, Horace simply twisted his head around backwards and dropped him under the stack of cars with the others. He stood up straight, head high, feeling into the wind.

Some people just never learned.

Following the pair of eyes, which were very large and very green, was a teenage girl with a willowy form but a bit of a belly. She was short, about five two, and faded, washed out. Blood ran down one whole side of her neck from a huge gash just above and slightly to the back of her temple, so that half her hair was bright blue and the other half was a deep, black-red, sticky and tacky. There was a silver dog chain around her small, pale throat, and it was cut up and into her flesh, coated in blood. She wore baggy, tattered black pants faded gray by too many washings, and they had big pockets near the bottom covered in small brass spikes. A black t-shirt with the logo SYSTEM OF A DOWN flapped coldly in the breeze. Hers was a round, china doll-like pale face with a sweet mouth and a small button nose. She was too cute to really be pretty, and Baby had been her nickname.

Her name was Chamilla Mahar, or just Millie.

"Where…am I?" she asked herself. She looked down at herself, but she didn't really need to. She could see her own body lying just over by the dog dish, coated in blood and so pitifully blue skinned and bloody. She knew she must be dead.

She bent and picked something up off the ground. It was a motor part, now coated in blood and hair. Hers. It also looked as if it had been ripped out of something recently, too, for it was coated in oil as well.

She looked back up into the stars, a sad expression on her face, holding the motor part, the wind raping her two tone hair. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled, and she shivered. She had been orphaned by a fire eleven years ago, and had been alone most of her life, but as she stood there in the middle of a desolate junkyard, dead and betrayed by those she had thought of as friends, she thought she had never felt so alone.


	5. A sad little present

Ok, here's the deal. Horace, at the moment, knows nothing about Chamilla, and because he's not too bright, the missing dog chain, human blood and dead dog as of yet signify nothing. He is still alive for the moment.

p.s. Chamilla is mine. And I repeat, I know absolutely NOTHING about cars, so just about everything in here is probably wrong. Review and correct me!

Horace yawned silently and sat up in bed. He had buried the damn dog lastnight and gone straight to bed. Early morning sunshine lit up the dusty, grimy pane of glass that served as a window in his twinkie-mobile. He got dressed in the same thing he had worn the day previous and went outside to check on his car.

Horace stepped down off the last stair and went over to check under the hood. Cursing under his breath, he saw that one of the key parts was missing. The punks had probably known they wouldn't get away with jacking the car, and so had taken a key part so it wouldn't run. He slammed a fist down on a cinderblock in frustration. The damn kids! This was HIS car! His! He had been working diligently on it, ever since his father died and he was free to do as he pleased.

However, if he had been paying attention, he may have noticed that said missing part had been missing since yesterday, but that slipped his mind.

Still cursing silently under his breath, he slammed the hood down and closed the doors. He couldn't continue working on it if he didn't have the stupid fuel pump.

Unbeknownst to Horace, a pair of huge green eyes watched him from the overhanging shadow of a junked car. They saw his frustration, and they also noticed _him_. How different and lonely he seemed to be. She sympathized. She looked down at what she still held in her hand, dripping oil and physically _there_, and made a decision. Ripping a pice of cloth from the hanging car, she took a tube of black lipstick out of her pocket and wrote a simple note.

Then she stepped out into the sun.

Horace, of course, couldn't see her as she stepped out. He had been about to mount the bottom stair of his home when he spotted the missing piece on the topmost step, covered in chunks of what appeared to be skin, blood and hair. He picked it up, and a small piece of upholstery fell to the ground. He bent and picked it up. Written on it in some black, greasy stuff that looked like makeup, were these words:

**FOR YOUR CAR.**

Horace peered closer at the clotted, now maroon blood on it; it appeared to be fairy new. He touched it. It was cold by now, but it was still not quite black enough to be old. Then he noticed that the bits of hair were quite long, too long for a boy's.

And it was bright blue.

He strained his brain to remember. He didn't think any of the kids from last night had had blue hair, nor had any of them been girls, or boys with particularly long hair. He stood there holding it and thinking, trying to piece it all together, while Chamilla stood just to the side of him in the shade of another junked car, invisible to all. She watched him sponge the filth off of it with a wet wash cloth and go back to his car and affix the part into under the hood. She gave a small smile, and then disappeared into nothingness.

He still didn't know what it all amounted to, but he had his missing part now. For the moment, Horace was happy.


	6. News bulletin

This one's more of a news report on the missing people so far.

The sky outside was again black.

Horace had finished up with the car as far as under the hood concerned. Now all he needed to do was fix the body and the interior and his car would be finished at last.

And he would finish it before they came for him.

He knew they were going to, too. His TV was on, the rabbit ear antennas wrapped in tin foil so the reception would come in better. The news was on. A police officer was being interviewed.

"—_Have no idea how we're going to do it, to bend a human body, _any_ body in half like that, well, ah, they'd have to be pretty strong, and I just don't think what we have for firepower would stop that kind of, ah, carnage." _

Horace sat back and eyed the remains of his last meal stocked in distaste; as usual, they had managed to make it taste just like soggy, corrugated cardboard reheated.

"_So far, reports of missing persons in the area have amounted to about eight so far. Just last night, a mother reported her son as missing after he didn't return home the night before." _The screen shifted to show small thumbnail images in the upper right hand corner, showing all his victims so far.

"_So far reported missing are mother and daughter, Therese, age 40 and daughter, Alice, age 15, college student, Michael Thomas, 19, and Michelle Mitchells, 32. Just recently reported, of course, is the presumed dead Harold Loaner, age 16, who disappeared in the general vicinity of the local Junkyard, owned, of course, by the late David Mahoney. His son, Horace is suspected of these crimes, and anyone with any kind of information at all should contact a special hotline number…"_

Horace had seen enough. He switched the TV off and threw the remains of his meal out the open window for the birds to fight over. His latest three murders had not made it to screen as of yet, and the one he had just killed last night had to have been that Harold Loaner the news had been on about. He didn't care. The mother and daughter he had counted as just one, because they had been together and genuinely looking for some help.

He had so far brought his total up to eight. Eight people dead at his hands.

And he wasn't through yet.

He fingered the note written on the scrap piece of cloth like a lover. The words "for your car" had been rubbed out, but he intended to find whoever wrote it and make them pay for being anywhere near his junkyard, and his car.


	7. number 9 and a decision

Remember what Cyrus told Dennis in the movie during the capture of Horace about how many people he killed?.

p.s. I discovered a new face!

Horace put the SAAB through the metal compactor in the junkyard and crushed it flat to join the rest. He had no need for it.

Two days later found the usually nice, ordered little neighborhood in disarray. Parents would not let their children out after 7:00, no matter how old they were, and people driving on the road were grouped in twos and threes for more safety. Everywhere people went, they carried either a gun or a knife. If Horace could have seen them all, he would have laughed. As if their pathetic safety measures actually meant anything to _him._ He had decimated eight people with his _bare hands_, and they had been everywhere from kids with their parents, to lone hitchhikers, and look how _their_ careers turned out! Dead and not getting any fresher.

Then someone made a phone call that would change the lives of a lot of people in the next week to come.

A woman by the name of Lauren Carr called the police station and reported her 18-year old daughter missing. That was the last straw for the authorities. Something would have to be done about the Breaker, they decided.

Then something remarkable happened.

One boy came forth with news about the death of Lauren's daughter, Chamilla.

This boy was one of the teenagers who tried to steal the Breaker's car three days prior. The boy had straw blonde hair and round, dark eyes. He was about 17 or 18, Chamilla's age, but he was the weak link in the group of the five friends. After Harold had been caught, he said, he had been feeling guiltier about what they had done to the Mahar girl. He claimed she fell behind and they had left her alone and ran for it.

He and his remaining friends were currently sitting on probation in the local courthouse, and their parents were, to say the least, furious with them for trying to steal the car in the first place. But of course the boy had lied. In the end, he had just not been able to rat his friends out that way.

That night, the city hall had a meeting about what to do.

"Arrest him!" One grizzled old man yelled.

"Go up there and shoot him dead! He killed my boy!" yelled the mother of Harold Loaner.

The mayor tried, unsuccessfully, to restore calm.

Meanwhile, Horace carried new leather interiors to his car and began stripping the old out of it. He had already put the tires on, tires from his old tow truck.They weren't the best, but he could be picky later. Right now he had to hurry. He had found another note, this one on the hood of his car, written in the makeup on another old piece of cloth interior. It had warned him to hurry up. He knew the townspeople were going to rally up and come for him soon, he had not needed the note to tell him that, but he was grateful for the faceless friend and their notes anyway. It meant that not everyone was afraid of Horace Mahoney.

If only he could have figured out who it was!

Meanwhile, the city hall meeting had reached a decision.

Horace Mahoney must be put to death.


	8. Calliber justice

Alas! Poor Horace! At least he has a friend…

Chamilla watched the man from the shadows. His car was looking good.

She sat on an old tire and stared at her hands. She was still getting used to being dead. Sadly, she wondered if her mother knew, and what she was doing now. She wanted to write her mother a note, or give her a phone call, but then decided that was stuff that would probably scare the shit out of her. She wasn't the bravest woman in the world, and she was notoriously lacking in the common sense department. She would probably think it was a gag.

So immersed in her sadness, she felt her dead heart break into a thousand shards and she sat there as Horace finished his car, and she cried. Great racking sobs that no one could hear and that shook her back and forth like a rag doll. She cried for herself, and for her mother back home, last survivor of her already ravished family. Her mother must be out of her mind with sorrow.

Actually, her mother was in the process of writing her own farewell, a rope in the other hand, but Chamilla, thankfully, didn't know that.

She cried for all the things she never got to do, and for the places she never got to go. She cried for the man out in the junkyard working on his car. She felt sorry for him, and she wondered why she had to suffer the injustice of being a ghost. Then she decided she didn't care, because she would be around forever, plenty of time to do what she had always wanted to do.

As she sat in the shadows, she heard the distant shouts of people, a positive mob, and she became deeply frightened for the man out there, Horace was his name.

"Horace!" she screamed, invisible tears streaking her face, but of course, he couldn't hear her. This made another wave of sorrow crash over her, and she cried harder.

Shadows were starting to appear, and her panic ensued.

She got to her feet and ran out towards the man and his car.

Horace looked up. He thought he had heard someone say his name. Then he saw the people standing at the closed gates to the junkyard, armed with guns and flashlights, and he glared at them, growling deep back in his throat.

Suddenly, as the first shot rang out, he felt a hard shove in his side that threw him to the ground, so the shot missed him. Looking around wildly for the cause, seeing nothing, he grew careless.

Rushing at the gates now, roaring in rage, the shots kept coming, a whole barrage of them, and he felt the first ones smack into his torso with wet, meaty smacking sounds. They jarred his whole frame, but he kept running, unmindful of the sting and whine of the bullets. Those puny .22's didn't do shit.

"_Horace!"_

That time, he had heard the voice. It was a woman's, somewhat deep, and filled with sorrow and pain. He had never heard anything so sad in his life, and immediately, he felt his life flash before his eyes, every sad detail of it, and he realized he lacked in his life what everybody needed the most; friendship. He never, in all his 28 years, had had a single friend. Not one. This thought made him sadder, and for a moment, he stopped and let the bullets overtake him. He was bleeding from about a million different orifices, and he kept on coming.

The angry townsfolk and the cops felt no pity, although one man later would say he had seen something in the Breaker's eyes then that had almost made him stop and walk away out of pity.

Horace flung the gates open and started ravaging the townsfolk, but by this time, he was weak, and bleeding to death. A 9 millimeter slammed into his cheek. Another man let two rounds on a .22 into his face. He felt the neural signals in his brain begin to falter, and he finally went down, the great Horace Mahoney finally defeated.

Chamilla watched sadly from the sidelines, and she stood there with her hands at her breasts and cried silently. For Horace's fate. For her mother. For herself. She watched as the cops fired another two machine clips into the man's lifeless corpse, saw as his body jumped and jittered from the close range shots, and she cried.

The firing finally stopped, and the people simply looked on at what they had done. The Breaker lay in a heap of bullet wounds, bleeding on the ground like an animal, and they felt shame at what they had done. But at least they were rid of his carnage.

Three men grabbed his torso and another two grabbed his legs, and they began hauling Horace's body out of the junkyard. They would bury him next to his father in the local cemetery with an unmarked gravestone.

Out of the shadows stepped the ghostly image for the recently deceased Horace Mahoney, his work uniform tattered and bloody, his face and arms riddled with bullet wounds, his eyes angry. He saw Chamilla, and in that moment, both understood each other perfectly. He knew it had been she that had cried his name with so much sadness. It had been she who had been sending the anonymous notes and leaving them for him to find.

In that moment, both understood each other perfectly, and there was no need for words. Horace walked up to her and stood looking down at her upturned, tear streaked face, and a single, silent tear fell down his own. He reached down and gently wiped a tear off the girl's face, and she held his hand in hers and squeezed, crying harder than ever now, but silently. Horace let her.

Silently, the giant and the girl walked off into the dark, fading into a background of junked cars and old garages, hands linked.


End file.
